Where the light’s still on

I think I always wanted to become something like a witch’s cottage for the people I love.

Well, not the frightening sort of witch business people here in Europe once seemed so fond of burning.

East Asian witches are much calmer creatures than that.

They make berry jam from the garden.

They leave soup simmering gently on the stove.

They knit strange little sweaters in beautiful colors.

They sweep the porch at dusk and somehow keep little things alive.

Soft, safe little hiding places.

The kind of house with the light still on.

The kind of place you forget about while you are off living your own adventure somewhere else,

but when the world becomes too loud, or you suddenly feel like disappearing for a little while,

you can quietly return there without needing to explain yourself.

No performance. No shame. No questions.

Just warmth.

As the eldest daughter, my siblings have always secretly felt like the greatest treasure life handed me.

I suspect they have never once thought of me in quite the way I think of them, but honestly, that is perfectly fine.

Somehow, I naturally became “the reliable one” growing up, and to tell the truth, I liked it.

For me, listening — literally listening — has always been one of the purest forms of love I know how to give.

I love hearing the people I care about talk about themselves.

Their strange little thoughts. Their embarrassments. The stories they pretend are unimportant.

But when it comes to talking about myself, something in me goes so wrong.

To an almost ridiculous degree.

Especially in front of the people I love most, I suddenly become unable to tell what it is I’m actually feeling.

One spring, after everything quietly fell apart, I returned to my hometown for the first time in a while.

My sister and I sat side by side at an old rural hot spring so quiet and forgotten it almost felt as though the world itself had misplaced it.

The spring breeze was unbearably beautiful in the way only spring there can be.

Soft enough to make your heart ache for no clear reason.

We sat there lightly kicking the water with our toes.

Hot springs in our region are always a little too hot to stay in for very long — one of the few things we can secretly feel superior about out there — so we kept drifting in and out of the steam, wanting to stay just a little longer.

“I’m getting divorced, by the way" I said out of nowhere, trying to sound as casual as possible.

“...How do you feel about it?”

“Think I’m okay.”

A small silence.

Her face blurred softly behind the steam.

“There’s no way it wasn’t painful for you."

Almost as if she were speaking only to herself.

The words dissolved into the steam and the softness of the forgotten spring.

And then we moved on to another topic.

I wonder if she will ever know how much those words saved me in that moment.

For someone like me — someone who somehow turns being cared for into a kind of responsibility — there was almost nothing more comforting than that.

For a very long time, I thought loving people meant protecting them.

Protecting them from loneliness. From pain. From abandonment.

But there are some people you cannot protect simply by loving them hard enough.

I left my little sister crying somewhere I could no longer reach.

I left my brother, who never learned how to say “help me”, alone in a big chaotic city where it is very easy to get lost.

The people who loved me most, I hurt through my own helplessness.

Sometimes I think of the scene in Breakfast at Tiffany's where Holly pushes the cat away into the rain.

And afterwards, she cannot find him ever again.

I think, in some ways, I feel like I have spent years living inside that scene.

“What do you know about love?”

Someone once threw those words at me, and they remained lodged somewhere deep inside me like a splinter that never fully leaves.

Maybe I was never incapable of loving people.

Maybe I simply never learned how to receive love without turning it into debt.

Lately, I’ve been studying counseling and volunteering in listening support work.

I thought I was learning how to sit beside other people’s pain, but somehow it quietly became a journey of learning how to sit beside my own.

The truth is, nobody can carry another person’s suffering for them.

Loving people does not magically make them safe.

Thinking I could protect the people I love from every kind of sadness was, perhaps, its own form of arrogance.

In reality, I am an unbelievably fragile and helpless person.

Still, I do not want the people I love to believe that, in their darkest moments, they only have themselves.

I want to become someone who can sit beside another person’s pain without demanding explanations.

Someone who can say, without really saying:

Stay here for a while.

The light’s still on.